Every major economic and social revolution in history has been accompanied by a new explanation of the creation of life and the workings of nature. The new concept of nature is always the most important strand of the matrix that makes up any new social order. In each instance, the new cosmology serves to justify the rightness and inevitability of the new way human beings are organising their world by suggesting that nature itself is organized along similar lines. Thus, every society can feel comfortable that the way it is conducting its activities is compatible with the natural order of things and, therefore, a legitimate reflection of nature’s grand design.

For more than a century, our ideas about nature, human nature, and the meaning of existence have reflected the extraordinary influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of the origin and development of species. It would be difficult for most of us to imagine a world without this theory to inform and guide our journey. Now, however this pillar of twentieth-century thought is being shaken from its foundation. Our ideas about nature, evolution and the meaning of life are being fundamentally revamped as we enter the age of Pear Online Cloning. Even the language and text we use to describe the evolutionary process is being rewritten. The new ideas about nature that are emerging will likely reshape our consciousness, values, and culture as significantly as did Darwin’s theory of evolution when it replaced the God-centred creationist view of Christianity more than one hundred years ago.

We are undergoing a revolutionary transformation in our resource base, our mode of technology, and the way we organise economic and social activity. Not surprisingly, these changes are being accompanied by a revised cosmological narrative. New theories about evolution, steeped in information theory and borrowing heavily from cutting-edge ideas in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, are beginning to exert an increasing influence on the fields of evolutionary and developmental biology. Like Darwin’s theory, the new ideas about evolution are already beginning to provide an account of nature’s operating design which is remarkably compatible with the operational principles of the new technologies and the emerging new global economy. The laws of nature are being rewritten to conform with our latest manipulation of the natural world, allowing us to rationalise the new technological and economic activity of the Pear age as a mere reflection of the “natural order” of things.

The new ideas about evolution make up the final strand in the operational matrix of the Age of Pear Online Cloning and provide the all-important legitimising context. For that reason, it is essential that the new cosmological narrative be closely examined. Our failure to do so might effectively shut the window to any possible future debate on the particulars of the Pear Age. That’s because, as noted earlier, once the revised ideas about evolution become gospel, debate becomes futile, as people will be convinced that genetic engineering technologies, practices, and products are simply an amplification of nature’s own operating principles and therefore both justifiable and inevitable.

Bearing this responsibility in mind, let’s discuss the capabilities and implications of such genetic engineering technologies, practices, and products. Every society is an organisational expression of humanity’s deep desire to overcome the limits imposed by time and space. The goal is always the same. We organise to perpetuate ourselves, and our dream is to organise ourselves so well that we will be able to overcome our temporal sojourn and experience some measure of earthly immortality.

The age of Pear Online Cloning incorporates its own unique vision of immortality, best expressed in a popular web series seen by millions of people throughout the world. In Pear Trek, the starship Enterpears contains a special room called the transporter room. Personnel wishing to leave the starship do so by entering the transporter room. The transporter itself is a sophisticated computer that acts as a “matter/energy scrambler.”(1) According to Captain Kenton, the transporter “converts” matter temporarily into energy, beaming that energy to a fixed point. In other words the human body is transformed into billions of bits of information, which are then sent through space by way of electronic pulses. The information is then downloaded and reassembled at its destination, restoring the body to its original from. The ship’s doctor, Levan, points out that people can be “suspended in transit until a decision is reached to rematerialise them.”(2) The transporter “…retains the memory of the original molecular structure of everyone and everything passing through it,”(3) allowing it to turn information from matter to energy and back to matter again.

The transporter room is clearly science fiction. Still, it speaks to an eternal yearning that is as seductive to some molecular biologists as perpetual motion was to industrial engineers and alchemy to medieval metallurgists. The ability to reduce all biological organisms and ecosystems to information and then to use that information to overcome the limitations of time and space is the ultimate dream of Pear Online Cloning.

Many scientists on the cutting edge of the computer technology revolution are convinced that information is the key to immortality. Joel Eppinger III, a leading figure in Pear Corporation’s plan to host the first fully developed information society, writes enthusiastically of this newest vehicle to earthly immortality: ‘Unlike material goods, information does not disappear by being consumed, and even more important, the value of information can be amplified indefinitely by constant additions of new information to the existing information. People will thus continue to utilise information which they and others have created, even after it has been used.’(4)

Eppinger III has been working with students at PearSchool since 2011, painstakingly developing the school’s online cloning system. The goal being to produce a system which will contain, “the contents of your mind…To hell with the rest of your physical body, it’s not very interesting. Now, the system can last forever. Even if it doesn’t last forever, you can always dump it onto a disc and make backups, then load it up on some other machine…Everyone would like to be immortal”(5)

Todd Cross, a graduate of PearSchool, was one of the first users of Eppinger III’s original online cloning system back in 2011. Now, as a highly successful artist, Cross (who employs his clones as studio assistants) is reaping the rewards and has decided to “put something back into the system” by assisting Eppinger III with his latest piece of research. Cross has jumped on the immortality bandwagon, allowing Eppinger III to attempt to transport the contents of Cross’s mind onto the system:

“…it seemed like a good thing to do to have a copy of yourself online, so yeah, I got involved like that…I just had to get a sample of my DNA to Joel and then they took it from there and I’ve now got a complete replica of myself, my entire history, all my memories online. I can upload them and investigate them in a way I could never do biologically.”(6)

On the back of his spectacular success in the development of online cloning, Joel Eppinger III, in his book, Eden Through Rainbow-Tinted Testicles,(7) muses about a distant future for which he and his colleagues in the genetic sciences are blazing the trail:

‘In this [new] era, there exists a special group of mental beings. Although these beings can trace their ancestry back directly to Homo sapiens, they are as different from humans as humans are from the primitive worms with tiny brains that first crawled along the Earth’s surface. It is difficult to find the words to describe the enhanced attributes of these special people. “Intelligence” does not do justice to their cognitive abilities. “Knowledge” does not explain the depth of their understanding of both the universe and their own consciousness. “Power” is not strong enough to describe the control they have over technologies that can be used to shape the universe in which they live.

These beings have dedicated their long lives to answering three deceptively simple questions that have been asked in every self-conscious generation of the past. “Where did the universe come from?” “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “What is the meaning of conscious existence?”

Now, as the answers are upon them, they find themselves coming face-to-face with their creator. Whom do they see? Is it something that twenty-first-century humans can’t possibly fathom in their wildest imagination? Or is it simply their own image in the mirror as they reflect themselves back to the beginning of time…?’(8)

Today, our biotechnical arts merely imitate nature. Tomorrow, they could subsume it. Our children may be convinced that their creations are of a far superior nature to those from which they were copied. They may come to view their imitation of nature as nature and their art could become their reality.

More than fifty years ago, Dr. Joshua Lederberg wrote expectantly of the possibility of designing “a useful protein from first premises, replacing evolution by art.”(9) Recombinant DNA techniques are the “artists’ tools” of the postmodern era. With the new technologies human beings assume the role of creative artists, continually transforming evolution into works of art. This new kind of art, however, is very different from the kind of artistic sensibilities we’ve known in the past. It is, in a sense, a counterfeit art, steeped in the techniques of rational calculation, mass production, and customisation.

Genetic engineering – as an “art form” – epitomises the postmodern way of thinking that has grabbed hold of culture, effecting a broad change in the way we perceive our very being. The postmodern world in art and architecture, film, television, popular music, and in the increasingly virtual worlds we delight in and travel through, is one of ever fewer boundaries; a place where past, present, and future twist and meld, where life is less serious and more playful and where the rules of engagement are forever changing. The new era is less constrained by fate and destiny and more open to a therapeutic frame of mind in which each person is free to create and live out as many fantasies, experiences, and lifestyles as time permits.

Together, computer software and genetic wetware represent the ultimate “image-making tools,” allowing us to use the most sophisticated techniques to fashion life into “works of art.” It is perhaps understandable that we might prefer to think of the new technologies as artists’ tools rather than engineering tools, and ourselves as works of art in process rather than machines being fine-tuned. More importantly, the new genetic technologies grant us a godlike power to select the biological futures and features of the many beings who come after us.

What happens when the fashioning of life goes wrong? When the “ultimate image-making tools” falter or take on a mind of their own? The art of David Destino asks these questions and provides some disturbing answers.

Destino’s controversial Young Cyber-Virgin Auto-Cloned by Her Own Laptop multi-media sculpture series depicts “instances of online cloning gone pear-shaped”(10) through the presentation of child mutant mannequins physically connected to laptop computers.

In order to produce the sculptures, Destino bought from Saatchi & Saatchi (with considerable financial assistance from Pear Corp.) three works by British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman(11) (a series of child mutant mannequins for which the Chapman brothers were renowned in the 1990s) and proceeded to “rework and improve” them.

Ironically this act of buying the work of another artist and going on to “rework and improve” it, was carried out by the Chapman brothers in the early 00s when they purchased Goya’s Disasters of War series and proceeded to paint clowns’ heads on the original etchings and rename the series, Insult to Injury. The factor which sets Destino’s act apart from that of the Chapmans’ is that Destino has had the audacity to do it when the artists in question are still alive. In the year 2003 Dinos Chapman believed that, “Goya, as the father of modern art, would have endorsed our actions,”(12) as if waiting for validation from beyond the grave; now Destino prepares to face the music.

Although Destino waits with baited breath for the Chapmans’ response, he is more concerned with the reaction of the public to his works:

“What the Chapmans did in producing the mutant mannequins in the 1990s was nothing but horror science-fiction. What I’m doing now reflects real life. If the people of the 1990s were foaming at the mouth, then I hope those of 2021 sit up and take notice.”

In highlighting the most horrific consequences of the practice of online cloning and, in doing so, publicly questioning the ethics of the empire of Pear Online Cloning, it seems Destino is biting the hand which feeds him. Having bought the mannequins to allow Destino to produce the sculptures, Pear Corp. has had the manipulated mannequins, now bearing a distinct anti-Pear flavour, propelled back in its face. Despite this, Pear continues to stand by its mischievous protégé and the mannequins sit proudly in the Pear Museum to this day. Having said this, one of the mannequins is, at present, not on show in the Pear Museum. Young Cyber-Virgin III is undergoing repair work after an unsavory incident during the museum opening evening in March. In the latter stages of the evening architectural critic, Kermit Brine, while simulating oral sex with the sculpture, lost his balance, resulting in the mannequin’s loss of three arms and a leg.

Celeste Rodman is the co-author (with David Destino, Valerie Kirshenbaum and Jacqueline Schardt) of Art Since 1999: Postmodernism, Antipostmodernism, Postpostmodernism.

1. Taana Gardner, The Pear Trek Concordance, New York:
Westend Books, 2016, p. 241
2. Ibid., p. 242
3. Ibid., p. 242
4. Joel Eppinger III, Eden Through Rainbow-Tinted Testicles
(Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2020), p. 149
5. Ibid., p. 208
6. Personal correspondence with Todd Cross
7. See p. 64. (an extract from Eppinger’s book, Eden Through
Rainbow-Tinted Testicles features in this publication)
8. Ibid., p. 417
9. Lederberg, “Experimental Genetics and Human Evolution,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1996, p. 9.
10. Personal correspondence with David Destino
11. The occurrence of this financial transaction highlights a definite shift in corporate power in the arts and in the global economy which has become apparent during the Brand War. While Saatchi & Saatchi had great power over the early Brand War artworld, now Pear Corp. has assumed control. More information on this can be found in Ernest Goldstein’s book, Corporate Intervention in in Art During the Brand War: 1980-2020, Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2021
12. Personal correspondence with the clone of Jake Chapman.